Category Archives: Blog

Inform Yourself Globally – Act Locally

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“Water, water everywhere.  Nor any drop to drink”, wrote Coleridge in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  We feel the mariner’s pain today when we write, “News, news everywhere.  Nor any idea to validate”. 

There was a day when I awaited the postman for my monthly subscriptions to educational journals and periodicals.  Today’s in-box is flooded with both subscribed and unsolicited postings.  As soon as I seek educational info on the web, the all-seeing eye of its hosts provides a torrent of information.  News information cascades in such a flood that it is often difficult to find one uncontradicted idea to pursue, one idea that is can be validated and is worthy of implementing.

Still, it is essential for an educator to read and inquire globally.  Reading with such a wide lens creates an understanding of the scope and depth of issues.  Case in point – the pandemic is worldwide and pandemic effects on education are worldwide.  Its manifestations lead to intriguing and unnerving stories that will affect today’s students and our educational institutions for decades.  Gaps in educational achievement caused by poverty, interrupted access to instruction, and personal social-emotional distress are evident across the nation.  Teaching and learning are changed by the pandemic.  The entire educational enterprise in our pandemic world is changed in ways we cannot yet fathom.

The lingering question is – all indications tell us that pandemic school is and will not be like pre-pandemic school – how does this information affect our local school?

What do we know?

One strand within the flood of news is this – pandemic children returning to school in 2022 are not like pre-pandemic children who left school in 2020.  Strengthen this strand to include teachers.  Students and teachers in 2022 are not like students and teachers in 2020.  Globally, all indicators tell us that this statement is true.

What to do?

This may be a lottery-winning question.  Hundreds of thousands of schools in our nation are on the cusp of this question.

Test the questions above.  Will the 2022 students and teachers in your school be like the 2020 students and teachers you knew?

We are at Robert Frost’s fork in the road.  We either –

  • Like our 2020 school so much that we reinvent that iteration of teaching and learning, student and teacher relationships, and educational services, or,
  • Accept that 2020 is history and 2022 is the present and has more to do with the future than 2020.  We analyze our current, local conditions and create/reform educational services that address the changed nature of students, teachers, and teaching and learning.

Why is this decision necessary?

Globally, the news tells us that pandemic education is caught in a whirlpool.  We are spinning around in a cycle of indecision – make schooling continuous, 2020 and beyond or acknowledge that true changes have occurred.  Test this statement in the evidence of your own reading. 

A local school needs to jump out of the spin cycle and decide its future.  It cannot be both – a 2020 and 2022 school.  Until a local school makes this decision and acts locally, that school and everyone associated with it remains in a quandary of a lack of focus.  Our children, teachers, and community deserve a focus.

Look at the state of education at large then act locally to bring your school out of the pandemic whirlpool.

Do It Differently, Smarter – Student Rounds

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“I spend the first days and weeks of the school year getting to know my students so that I can meet their needs as learners.”  I have heard this statement each September since the 1970s and I frown.  What hubris!  Unless the child is new to your school, teachers have a wealth of relevant and reliable information about every student’s needs at their fingertips.  There is no need under the sun to waste the first days and weeks “getting know” your students.  Why don’t we do it differently and smarter and do educational rounds just as medical doctors do patient rounds?  And, do these rounds at the end of the preceding school year so that a teacher has all summer to use solid information to plan for each child’s instruction in the fall.

Current Practice

On the last day of school in the spring, the experts who know the most about the students in a teacher’s next fall assignment go home.  Historically, the last days of school are all about ending the current school year.  Records are updated and classrooms are closed.  School is vacated for the summer recess.  The knowledge next year’s teachers need departs for the summer.

Ten weeks later teachers return to school in the last week of August to prepare for a new school year.  The major focus of August work is getting classrooms ready for children and teaching.  As a rule, more professional time is spent reviewing school rules and regulations and putting up bulletin board displays than is spent in discussion of student learning needs.  We are compelled to get ready for the first day of school and most teachers sitting in August PD meetings wish they were in their classrooms doing their physical preparation tasks.

Check this out.  A teacher who cannot pronounce the name of a child in their classroom on the first day does not know that child’s learning needs.  Mispronunciation of the names of children who were students in the school last spring occurs in almost every classroom.  Not knowing how to pronounce a continuing student’s name is a sign that no teacher-to-teacher discussion of learning needs has taken place.

At best, we hold rushed meetings in which counselors share information about various students and their learning challenges.  There is scant time for a teacher to delve into those needs and plan instruction.  We prioritize classroom readiness not instructional readiness. 

The closest current practice comes to rounds is an IEP or 504 Plan meeting that includes all of a child’s teachers plus parents and advocates.

Student Rounds in the Summer

Better practice is to extend contracts for all teachers beyond the last of school and use time at the end of a school year for this year’s teachers to tell next year’s teachers what they know about promoted children.  There are many ways to implement and schedule rounds. 

Grade level to grade level – Within a schedule, 4K talks to 5K, 5K to first grade, until all grade level conversations are completed.  This organization favors more global discussion as teachers discuss each child across all instruction.  All teachers of a grade level, including special subjects and special education participate.  Grade level to grade level applies to children 4K into middle school or until the next year’s student schedule is dominated with elective or leveled courses.

Subjects within grade levels – This organization focuses on each subject areas of instruction and completes one subject area before starting a next area.  Regular, special education, and second language teachers share in discussing each child’s development in one subject at a time.  If there are different art, music, PE, and technology teachers at different grade levels, subject area sharing is the pathway for “specials” teachers to share student information teacher-to-teacher.

Secondary Subject departments – The daily class pathway for children in secondary school fans out, especially in high school with multi-grade classes and electives and an array of teachers.  Using the next year’s already developed student schedules, children are ordered alphabetically and information about their learning preferences, challenges, and uniqueness is shared. 

Face-to-face – School leadership may choose to organize students rounds as a whole school, all teachers at the same time and in the same place activity.  Every student-based meeting is face-to-face.

Virtual – We became better than average facilitators of virtual, group meetings in the pandemic.  Rounds can be held with teachers in school or at home or other locations using virtual platforms.  Virtual rounds accommodate teachers and administrators’ preferences to work from or home.

Why Rounds?

Fresh details matter.  In primary grade transitions, the current teacher has fresh knowledge of the child’s mastery of phonemic sounds and letters and ability to pronounce new words and spell words on demand.  Because these details are fresh, the current teacher can anecdotally describe what works best to support this child’s learning.  Freshness details are diminished over the summer as each former student melds into the greater group of former students.  This just simply happens.

Magnify this across all the children in a school and fresh details become even more important.  There is no reason for next year’s teachers to await similar experiences to arise when they can learn from and plan using the expert commentary of their colleagues.

Learning styles and preferences matter.  Although there is current literature that devalues learning styles profiling, the truth is that some children prefer to watch, listen, or do.  Whereas teachers want to develop broader learning modalities for all children, starting a school year with a child’s preferences creates early school year success and nothing succeeds greater than early success.

Progress in annual strategies prepared by a teacher and a child’s parents’ matter.  We tout and encourage parents to engage with teachers to create student-centered partnerships.  There is no reason to recreate new partnerships every time a teacher assignment changes.  Our current practice of starting a new discussion about their child confirms for parents that teachers are independent contractors and do not cooperate or collaborate.  This is not the storyline we want to perpetuate.  Just share what you know and build upon what you collectively know.  Be professionally seamless.

SEL challenges matter.  Children face developmental challenges as they transition from pre-school to 4K-5K, grade school to middle school, from pre-adolescence adolescence, and into semi-independent learners in high school.  The pandemic and remote education caused challenges for children returning to in-person schooling.  These mean that teacher-to-teacher discussions about children are even more important.  In-school behaviors and dispositions about school, respect and consideration for teachers and fellow students, and consistent school attendance all took hits from the pandemic.  Lack of shared knowledge hampers a child’s next teacher understanding of what she needs to know on day one of a school year.

What To Do?  If you believe your current practices optimize your teachers’ knowledge of the children they will teach in fall, continue with your current practices.  If you believe your current practices are not preparing all teachers for their next year’s students, develop your version of student rounds.  You have a wealth of knowledge about your students, use that knowledge to their advantage in preparing for the 2022-23 school year.  Do student rounds.

Do It Differently, Smarter – Teaching and Learning Is Not Piece Work

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Henry Ford’s assembly line strategies revolutionized industry.  In a Ford plant, all work was piece work – an employee did one task repeatedly as the car chassis passed down the assembly line.  The speed of the “chain” determined work productivity.  Optimized speed of assembly and quality control were the abilities of all workers to do their assigned piece work in a predetermined number of minutes.  The image to consider is a naked car chassis at the beginning of the assembly line and complete and drivable car emerging at the end of the line.  It takes an extreme emergency for the speed of the assembly line chain to slow or stop – it never backs up.

What we should know.

Transfer that image to school.  A 4K child is at the beginning of the assembly line and a graduate emerges at the end of a school’s edu-assembly line.  In the early 1900s schooling took on an assembly line process.  Thank you, Henry Ford and John Dewey, and 1892’s Committee of Ten.  Elementary schools build the chassis and secondary school does the finishing work.  The chain runs 180 school days.  Teachers apply grade level or subject content knowledge and skills to the student as the child moves through the K-12 system.  Quality control is measured by standardized tests and displayed on a bell curve – some children demonstrate a higher quality of education than others, but any student within the parameters of two standard deviations below the norm is promoted and graduated.

Most educators do not like the image or analogy of schooling to assembly line work.  It offends their professional sensitivities.  However, current, and usual school operations look like, feel like, sound like, and are like assembly line work.  If you doubt this, try to change the speed of the school chain, or modify the work done at each grade level or subject along the edu-line.  It should not be difficult to do, but it is.  Try to diminish the school year by 10 days or make it longer by ten days.  The system will fight back and after much argument the chain will remain set at 180 days with its traditional work being done at each workstation.

What to do?

Accept that school is an assembly line and change the nature of the work along the assembly line.  It is the work at each teaching station along the line that matters.

My work with the WI DPI on teacher licensing requirements says that the teaching act is a sequence of six steps.  Each teacher candidate is required in pre-student teaching and student teaching to demonstrate evidence of their proficiency in:

  • Planning – creation of unit and lesson plans
  • Teaching – using a variety of teaching strategies, including explicit teaching
  • Assessment – formative assessment of initial student learning success
  • Reflection – the use of formative assessment data to help the teacher clarify, correct, enhance student learning
  • Adjustment of teaching – tactical use of differentiated teaching strategies to clarify, current, enhance student learning
  • Re-assessment – summative assessment at end of lesson or unit

This sequence is built into every unit and lesson design.  Each step is plain to see and document and verify.

What Makes the Edu-line Different?

It is the emphasis on the three middle points points – assessment, reflection, and adjustment of teaching – that separates education from piece work.  Henry Ford did not want an assembly line worker checking the effectiveness of their work, stopping the chain for a closer inspection, talking with other workers about how to fix an error in the car’s assembly, or to check for quality after the fix was applied.  We do.  In education, this is what makes good teaching effective teaching.

A child is a very messy car chassis.  Unlike a metal frame, a child moves, speaks, has personality, and individuality.  A child’s mind may still be on recess during a late morning lesson in reading or thinking about lunch while doing arithmetic.  A child may wriggle and moan when called upon to sing a solo or be bashful in showing an art project.  Messy is anathema to assembly line work.  The truth is teaching children is messy work and time effort committed these three essential steps – assessment, reflection, ad adjustment – is how we ensure that every child is a successful learner.

What does this look like?

We need to insist that every lesson and every unit has built in requirements for assessment, reflection, and adjustment.  Bell curve be damned.  The lesson does not move to re-assessment or to a next lesson until a teacher has demonstrated assessment, reflection, and adjustment and exercised all efforts to ensure successful learning.

Assessment, reflection, and adjustment require teacher time.  These tasks are not accomplished while a teacher is driving to school in the morning or home after school.  They are not accomplished during a teacher’s lunch time.  And they are not accomplished while a teacher is doing daily prep period work.  Interestingly, the number one function of teacher prep time is a bathroom break.  The next most important functions are talking to another adult, checking correspondence, and just taking a break from being on the classroom stage.  The assessment, reflection, and adjustment of daily teaching rarely surfaces in a teacher’s usual school day.  We need to face this reality – daily prep time before, during and after the school day is inadequate for the assessment, reflection, and adjustment of ongoing teaching.

We need to build new organizational structures to ensure that all teachers have the time and resources for assessment, reflection, and adjustment of new teaching.

Intermittent breaks.

The administration provides individual teachers with a substitute teacher for a school day and the classroom teacher engages in assessment, reflection, and adjustment work.  That is the only assignment the teacher has on this day.  Prior to the intermittent day break, the teacher and administrator select the unit(s) of instruction to be the focus of the break day.  They discuss the assessment data to be examined.  The teacher uses this day to make a full evaluation of student learning via the teacher’s observations, existing assessment data, and any personal education plans (IEPs and 504s) for her students.  Reflection is reviewing the lesson plans for this unit(s) and notating parts that were successful and parts that were not as successful.  Reflection also is consideration of the teacher’s expectations for student performance on the assessment(s).  Adjustment is a planning of a necessary lesson(s) that will assist all children to achieve the teacher’s expectations on re-assessment that will follow these necessary lesson plans.

Intermittent breaks assures that all children in the school have continuous instruction AND rotates all teachers into their intermittent day break.  Every teacher in the school is provided intermittent breaks several times each school, perhaps once each quarter.

An intermittent break fits every teacher because the assessment data is the teacher’s data – it is not state assessments that are narrowly academic.  All subject area teachers, e.g., art, music, PE, second language, shop, use their intermittent break to assess, reflect, and adjust their subject area teaching and learning.

Whole school breaks.

The advantage of whole school breaks for assessment, reflection, and adjustment is that all teachers are available for this work.  The administration places a whole school break day on the school calendar so that parents can plan for a day when children are not in school.  Whole school breaks are scheduled once each quarter of the school calendar.

On whole school break days, all teachers are available for grade level, subject area, special grouping collaboration.  A team of grade level teachers can provide each other with insights and observations and alternative adjustment strategies.

Whole school break days can also be in-person and/or remote workdays.  Whole school break days also contribute the mental health of the school by releasing all students and teachers from the usual routines of continuous school. 

Reduced daily assignments to create daily time.

A school that wants to institutionalize teacher availability for assessment, reflection, and adjustment can build time for these three activities into teachers’ daily assignments by removing one or more classes for each teacher’s assignment.  For example, instead of assigning a teacher to teach five classes per day with one period of preparation time, assign the teacher four classes per day with one period every day for assessment, reflection, and adjustment and one period for preparation.  This requires hiring additional teachers to be assigned the teaching of class periods removed from other teacher’s usual schedules.

Costs – Pay Now or Instead of Later

There is cost to providing breaks for assessment, reflection, and adjustment of teaching.  One cost is the employment of substitute teachers, or the employment of more teachers.  There is the cost of additional resources for adjusted teaching – the same old, same old will not produce new results.  There also is the cost of institutionalization and constant prioritization of assessment, reflection, and adjustment in the school. 

When considering the cost of hiring more teachers, consider the cost to student learning of not providing consistent time for assessment, reflection, and adjustment.  Because schools are edu-assembly lines, we keep the edu-chain moving until after student failures to learn have piled up and we play catch up trying the remediate students out of sequence with their learning.  We spend more annual revenue hiring intervention teachers, tutorial aides, and assigning students to summer school and other make-up venues than we need to.   Instead, use those financial and professional resources to ensure adequate assessment, reflection, and adjustment of teaching in the real time of lesson and unit instruction. 

The Key Essential for Breaks

The essential element for making an assessment, reflection, and adjustment break successful is an administrator/teacher conversation about the goals for the break.  This is laser focused work on teaching and learning – what worked to cause successful student learning, what did students NOT successfully learn, how can teaching be changed and improved to cause all students to be successful learners, and then teaching using those changes and improvements. 

Teaching that is carefully targeted for students with enough rigor and challenge will always cause a distribution of learning successes.  Teaching that all students succeed at in at their first exposure is undertargeted.  Conversely, if no students succeed in the first exposure, then teaching has been overtargeted.  Assessment, reflection, and adjustment are how teachers practice this sequence – aim, fire, adjust your aim, fire again – instead of our usual fire, aim, fire again

This is effective teaching and effective teaching is not piece work.

Personalized Education Plan as Antidote to Pandemic Education Losses

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Those who believe that all children are resilient and submerging them in the normalcy of school will cure the significant direct and indirect losses they suffered during our pandemic education are looking for coins under their pillow left by the tooth fairy.  Their losses will not be made whole without a clear understanding of pandemic effects and explicit actions taken to remedy those effects.  Anything less will create a bruised generation of young adults we could and should have treated better.

I look at children getting off the morning bus at school and see children who look like any children of any pre-pandemic year.  Part of my observation, I know, is that I want to see children who are wholesome and happy and well in every sense of the word.  Then, I listen to teacher observations and examine the data of students’ returned-to-school learning and I see children who are not what they should be.  They exhibit attitudes and dispositions that are getting in the way of their successful school experiences.  They have gaps in their school skills and knowledge and culture that cause them undeserved yet solvable problems. 

It is inaccurate to ascribe these observations to all children.  However, it is accurate to ascribe one or more of these to each child.  And, that is where our necessary work begins.  Our pandemic mitigations were school- and grade-wide.  We closed school for all children, attempted to provide remote instruction to all children, quarantined classes and grade levels after their return to school, and restricted access to school life and its activities for the better parts of two years.  I attempt no fault finding; the work is not backwards but forwards.  How do we help all children now?

Primary strategy: Personalized Education Plan

The primary strategy for making all children educationally whole and sound from their pandemic effects needs to be an educational and developmental assessment of each child and from that assessment individualized, small group, and whole group remedial treatments. 

Begin the strategy with PEPs for all 4K-5 children, those whose dispositional and learning are most foundational and for whom small group and large group remediation will be most efficient and effective.  Assess and know the extent of learning and dispositional gaps for each child.

  • 5K and grade 1 children lacked 4k and 5K experiences to socialize them to school success. 
  • 4K-grade 5 children lack educational stamina; remote ed taught them turn off and disengage when assignments and experiences required more than they wanted to commit.  Or, when school failed to engage with them.
  • 4-grade 5 children learned to isolate from their pandemic experience; screen time provided their socialization and remains their go to escape when in-personal interactions are required.
  • 4K through grade 3 lacked explicit instruction in phonemic development, structured language and vocabulary acquisition, and progression in reading fluency.
  • Grade 3-5 children display gaps in numeracy arithmetic skills, especially in concepts and automaticity of multiplication, division, and conceptualization of fractions.
  • 4K-grade children lost second language development, musical literacy, and cooperative teaming in physical education.

Creating a PEP for each child demonstrates a school’s commitment to post-pandemic education.  I am not calling out schools who do not take such explicit actions, but I do place them in the tooth fairy believers category.  A PEP requires time and expense to develop, time and expense to implement, collaboration among educators and parents, and a mutual understanding that without explicit strategies children will not overcome the ill effects of their pandemic education.  A PEP is a statement regarding school commitment each child’s worth and well-being.

School-wide Post-Pandemic Plans

Parallel to PEPs for all 4K-5 is the need for school-wide implementation of student dispositional remediation, social-emotional and mental health servicing, and trauma-sensitivity training. 

On their return to school, middle level children advanced grade levels without developing the social and dispositional skills required for middle level and high school success.  Children who were in 5th grade in 2019-20 were 7th graders in 2021-22.  They leap-frogged from smaller, self-contained groupings of students, elementary-trained teachers, pre-adolescent social settings into a secondary schedule of changing classes, subject-trained teachers, academic-oriented instruction, and the milieu of middle level adolescence and puberty.  They went from Earth to Mars without climate orientation.  And, their current school work shows this ill-effect of the pandemic.

Secondary children, especially, demonstrate a turn-it-off disposition in their return to school regarding school procedures and classroom requirements.  Their

  • rates of tardiness and absenteeism,
  • defiance toward cell phone rules,
  • lack of assignment completion, and
  • non-compliance with teacher direction

 are off the chart compared with pre-pandemic secondary children.  These are pandemic effects and must be treated as effects that can and must be remediated.  Children were largely non-directed and independent while in remote education.  They learned habits that are not serving them now.

Administrators and teachers must carve the time and resources from the already packed school calendar and school budgets for individual, small group, and large group treatments.  We will not achieve social and emotional wellness without making new school-wide, annual processes and systems for teaching all children these dispositions.  And, creating improved systems for identifying children who are S-E stressed and mentally unhealthy. 

Schools do not have and are not authorized to have full mental health services.  Yet, in rural school communities, especially, distances between homes and services make school new mental health centers.  We need collaboration with county health services and private mental health providers if we are to create necessary post-pandemic treatments for children.

Imagine how these children will fare in their post-secondary world if they persist in behaviors caused by the ill effects of the pandemic.  They and our community deserve our commitment to remediating the ill  effects of their pandemic education or our community and nation will be feeling these ill-effects for decades to come.

What to do?

Start with PEPs for each 4k-5 child.  Start with individual, small group, and large group strategies of remediate the pandemic effects that your assessments reveal.  Start with a commitment and investment in direct and explicit actions that will make all children educationally and developmentally better.  Start with whole school training so that all faculty and staff are attuned to how today’s children are different than yesterday’s.  Do not believe tooth fairies will make all your wishes come true.

Summer – School’s Necessary Fifth Quarter

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I always smiled when Click and Clack, as NPR’s “Car Guys”, welcomed listeners to the third half of their hour-long radio broadcast.  The “third half” was how they partitioned and used their time on the air not about the  arithmetic of three halves making a whole.  In a like manner, summer is an educator’s fifth quarter.  After the four quarters of a school year are completed, summer is the interlude, the fifth quarter for professional reflection, analysis, and  planning. There is scant time in the four quarters of a school year for these three activities because daily teaching is all about meeting the immediate needs of students – it is on-demand work.  The fifth quarter is all about review, consideration, and design. 

In earlier blogs, I have made the professional case for teachers to be calendar year employees not just school year.  Today, I let the needed work of education provide the argument.

The case for reflection.  A wonderful young teacher in our school district assembles and makes an online posting every Monday of the coming week’s school activities.  The weeks of May and early June are loaded to the gills with events – school for all ages is non-stop, on-the-go motion.  The spring musical and spring sports schedules, grade level trips to Madison and Green Bay, the spring music concerts, Senior Banquet, and graduation make the days and evening of spring a mad dash to the finish line for teachers.  It is acceleration into a quick and final deceleration – and the school year is over. 

On her weekly postings of school events there is no time designated for reflection on the school year soon ending.  There is not one minute of a school day invested in our teachers’ retrospection about the 2021-22 academic year.  Everyone is engaged in the forward motion of ending the school year. 

Incorporated in the definition of a professional is the capacity and commitment to being reflective about one’s professional work.  Candid reflection affirms the good practices leading to positive outcomes and leads to improvement or elimination of weaker practices.  Professionals are reflective yet our school provides no time for reflection.  We need to make professional reflection a planned reality in our school year of days.

The case for analysis.  Earlier in May our students sat for their spring assessments.  Elementary children completed the spring end of their annual universal screener assessments.  Elementary and middle level children completed their spring ACT Aspire assessments.  High school children took AP exams and final whacks at the ACT.  Every child in our school was tested, some multiple times.  All of these were calendared on our weekly announcements.  What I didn’t see was scheduled time for reflection and analysis of these data.  Nada.

We assume teachers have time in May and early June before the last day of school to reflect on their school year and the end-of-year data.  But when?  Time for teachers in the last quarter of the school year is fully subscribed.  Then, the school year is over.  Classrooms are closed and teachers depart for the summer. 

As of this date, no data meetings have been held in our school for the analysis of spring assessments, evaluation of each child’s fall to spring growth, or the effectiveness of our instruction.

If not now, when?  An organized reflection and analysis of instruction and learning is placed on the back burner of school life until late August and the return of teachers for a new school year.  The summer “quarter” is reserved for summer school and vacation.

Does this fly in the face of what we know is best practice?  You bet it does!  We know that mental retention is influenced by “meaningfulness”.  When information is compellingly meaningful we pay attention to it.  When information is current and relevant we pay attention to it.  When information affects our ongoing work we pay attention to it.  Postponing the reflection and analysis of spring assessment data until late August treats these data as irrelevant to our teaching and learning. 

We know that August is “ramp up time” for the start of a new school year.  The scant time in our August in-service days is loaded with getting classes, classrooms, and new colleagues ready for Game Day – the first day of school.  Inserting data analysis into the week before school starts leaves every teacher in the room wishing they were somewhere else getting ready for Game Day.  Analysis of SY 21-22 data the week before Game Day is lip service to data analysis.  Administrators and teachers alike know this for what it is – not meaningful and not productive.

The Fifth Quarter – Oh, the good we could do with time outside the school year calendar.  First, a fifth quarter is outcome-based not time- or place-based.  Work time can begin at 9:00 or later.  Work place can be at school or not – how about a coffee shop.  Shorts and sandals or whatever is the garb of the hour.  We know how to do remote and work from home and this fits well into a fifth quarter.

The critical attributes are the reflection upon our work and the analysis of our data each directed at an informed planning for the next school year.  In our small, rural school, fifth quarter should mean a  reflection and data analysis on a student-by-student basis resulting in an informed plan for each student’s teaching and learning in the next school year.

Fifth Quarter For All – The fifth quarter is all about school responsibility and accountability.  It applies to all school faculty and staff.  Food service, cleaning and maintenance, transportation, guidance and counseling, athletics and activities and arts – every facet of the school enterprise benefits from fifth quarter work.  We focus so much attention upon teaching and learning that we tend to ignore the other necessary work that makes a school function with efficiency and effectiveness.  Fifth quarter review, consideration and design improves the next year’s work of every school worker.  Too often it takes a seismic event to change practices in transportation, food service, and maintenance.  Instead, allow thoughtful and timely review and consideration change the design of that work.

Commitment to a Fifth Quarter – School boards need to commit dollars to the fifth quarter; the boards are buying professional time.  Administrators need to commit responsibility and accountability to the fifth quarter; making time and resources available and engaging with teachers in the reflection and analysis.  And at the end of the fifth quarter, the administration is responsible for ensuring that the quarter’s work shapes teaching and learning in the fall of the new school year. 

Even though review, reflection and design are inherent in teaching, if they are not explicitly constructed in the school calendar, they fall to the wayside of passing time.  And, then we wonder why one school year feels like the same old, same old of the previous.